If you are a person who loves reading, and would love to read anywhere without fear of damaging a book with rough handling, then this gadget might just be the perfect thing for you. The gadget in question is the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro. How easy is the Ez Reader? Well lets find out.
Design wise, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro is a compact, thin and beautifully designed gadget. The particular model I used, which was black in color, looked very elegant. The shiny, metallic surface imparts a very sophisticated look to the gadget. As for the dimensions of the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro, it measures around 6″ x 4.1″ x 0.4″. The Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro is also designed to be one of the more lightweight digital readers in the market. In fact, I would safely say that the size and weight of this gadget rivals closely that of the iPad.
Oddly, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro has text-to-speech option. This option is very rarely found in digital ebook readers. In fact, this is the first time I am seeing this option in a gadget like this. Very well, since they have installed this feature, I tried it out. The result was quite disappointing. The speech pattern was predictably mechanical. Some woves were very hard to understand. At one point, The monotone speech got so annoying until I had to disable it. My verdict on this one? Not the best text-to-speech feature I have seen.
As for performance, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro comes with a 400MHz processor. Though considerably slower than an average Smartphone processor, bear in mind that the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro has less functionality compared to a smartphone. This would result in an enhanced performance in this gadget even with a relatively slow processor such as this. Memory options include 512 MBs of internal memory. On its own, the memory is on enough if you have plenty of books. However, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro thankfully comes with a SD Card slot for memory expansion. The gadget-card interface is swift and experiences virtually no processing delays.
Now we come to the important part: the actual reading. Reading is facilitated by a 5″ LCD screen. The screen displays texts very clearly and brightly. The technology used in this screen enables the user to discern various individual alphabets and characters even though the font size of the text you are reading is small. The Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro supports a wide range of text based files, which includes the popular DOC, CHM, FB2, PDF, TXT and EPUB file formats. Additionally, if you like your books read to you, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro also supports MP3 audio ebooks. If you ask me, you would be better off listening to audio ebooks compared to using the text-to-speech feature. Audio clarity is very good, especially if you use a good set of earphones.
All in all, the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro costs around $200. That is a fraction of the price of an iPad. Nevertheless, you would have to forgo some iPad features such as games, video viewing and 3G network connectivity. However, if you want a gadget solely for reading, then the Aztak Ez Reader Pocket Pro might just be the right thing for you.